Interrogates living in the world as an artist who feels like words aren’t able to have enough of an immediate impact (if any at all) and direct action’s impact is too fleeting.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jun 24, 2024

Might be Schrader’s most visually bold work...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 25, 2023

Using Mishima’s novels to build up his life and his conversion to ultranationalism, Schrader and his brother, Leonard (who co-wrote the script) make Mishima a man of conflicting ideals...

| Mar 7, 2023

Mishima is an impressive work. Like Oshima's "Gishiki" and "Nihon no Yoru to Kiri," which unquestionably influenced the American filmmakers, it uses both realistic and hallucinatory sequences to paint a disturbing portrait of contemporary Japan.

| Feb 10, 2023

Stylistically and visually, the movie is sumptuous, innovative, and rich.

| Aug 26, 2022

Mishima is so tight it comes close to strangeling its own schema. But it doesn't.

| Aug 8, 2022

Despite a genuinely resonant performance by Ken Ogata as the mature Mishima, what finally emerges is a psychological drama without a Rosebud, a puzzle that, when all the pieces fall neatly into place, leaves us cold.

| Apr 7, 2022

Ah, but a noble failure is still a failure, you say. But Mishima is not a failure. No film that asks you to grasp your own life and to consider its ultimate value can be considered a failure.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 5, 2022

This handsomely shot movie, with its throbbing Philip Glass score, has a kind of perverse integrity; its mixture of the art house and the hothouse is pure Schrader.

| Apr 5, 2022

Paul Schrader’s film Mishima is a boldly conceived, intelligent and consistently absorbing study of the Japanese writer and political iconoclast’s life, work and death.

| Apr 5, 2022

Schrader, with a wonderful mixture of non-linear structure and surreal production design, transcends the generic boundaries of the biopic towards something approaching psychological portraiture.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2022

Just as his subject sought to reconcile intellect and action, words and deeds, Schrader finds a perfect union between sound and image, weighty ideas, and giddy sensual rapture.

| Original Score: A | Apr 5, 2022

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is exemplary for its elegance, taste and restraint. Mishima's life might all too easily have been sensationalized -- indeed it positively invites it -- but Ken Ogata's distinguished performance wholly averts the danger.

| Apr 5, 2022

[Mishima] marks one of Schrader’s finest efforts in documenting his characters’ impulses toward self-annihilation.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 5, 2022

Schrader's obsessive-puritanical philosophising is at its purest here, as he channels his usual concerns into a meditation on Mishima's tussles with love, death, honour and the spirit.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2022

Mishima, in a way, is just a teaser of a film biography, a haunting, artistically daring movie that mainly succeeds in arousing the audience's curiosity about this eloquent man of many faces.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 5, 2022

No movie could possibly capture the full emotional extravagance of such an individual, but Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, despite some vivid moments, is an exasperatingly misconceived attempt.

| Apr 5, 2022

A sterile and disagreeable folly... Open any novel of Mishima's and you will be struck by the sensuousness of the writing -- but Schrader's film is the least sensuous imaginable.

| Apr 5, 2022

As a film that demonstrates how art transfuses life and how life shapes art, it is an admirable effort.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 5, 2022

What keeps us watching the screen is not any special revelation, but the film makers' mad, nearly suicidal attempt to persuade the rest of us to share their fascination with the subject. That fascination eludes me, but I must say that I wasn't bored.

| Apr 5, 2022